Amid challenges, Google delays the deprecation of third-party cookies in Chrome until 2025, providing websites with additional transition time.
Now, brands have additional time to prepare and seek alternatives to third-party cookies. Nevertheless, this delay is merely temporary. Third-party cookies will eventually be phased out – just not this year.
The announcement was disclosed in the joint quarterly report on the Privacy Sandbox initiative by Google and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), following persistent challenges in reconciling feedback from industry stakeholders and regulators.
Chrome’s Third-Party Cookie Phaseout Pushed To 2025
Google has declared that it will not proceed with the elimination of third-party cookies during the latter half of the fourth quarter this year as initially planned.
Instead, the technology company intends to initiate the phase-out of third-party cookies in Chrome “early next year,” provided an agreement can be reached with both the CMA and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
Transition Period and Impact
In January, Chrome initiated the restriction of third-party cookie access for 1% of users globally. The plan was for this percentage to gradually increase until all users were covered by the third quarter of 2024.
However, with the latest delay, websites and services now have more time to shift away from dependencies on third-party cookies through Google’s limited “deprecation trials” program.
These trials provide temporary extensions for cookie access until December 27, 2024, specifically for non-advertising use cases that can demonstrate direct user impact and functional disruption.
While these trials aim to facilitate the transition, they come with strict eligibility criteria. Services related to advertising are not eligible, and origins matching known ad-related domains are excluded.
Publisher & Advertiser Implications
The ongoing delays underscore the potential disruption facing digital publishers and advertisers who rely on third-party cookie tracking.
Industry groups have expressed worries that limiting cross-site tracking could steer websites towards adopting more opaque and privacy-invasive practices.
Conversely, privacy advocates see the phaseout as essential in curtailing covert user profiling across the web.
With this latest postponement, all stakeholders have additional time to ready themselves for the eventual demise of third-party cookies and to embrace Google’s proposed Privacy Sandbox APIs as substitutes.
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